and you wonder why i hate everything? maybe i just hate economics in the digital age: some things are just too damned cheap.

basically, laptops completely freaking suck because there is no way to have the monitor height and the keyboard position not be complete ergonomic death. as if desk jobs didn't already screw us up enough?

another thing i love about the hallowed future of everything-as-a-web-app is how things like google docs don't appear to let me rename a document. well, maybe it does, somewhere, somehow, but it sure wasn't obvious or readily apparent to me when i looked. basically people are making up new UIs which might have something new and improved about them, but which (because usability is hard and because people suck) are statistically likely to have a lot of stupid crappy hateful things about them which get in the way of me just being able to get things done.

[Update: Ah hah! I guess you can't rename it from the bigger "file system browsing" view, you can only rename it from "inside" the document.]

I think if for no other reason than it is probably the best way for your run-of-the-mill OOPer to expand their horizons and make them really think, Haskell is (obviously, duh!) important. like, I wish I were learning it for real.

I wish I were smart. OK, sure, we did the same thing in college, but that's just the tip of his iceberg.

Wow. I guess I'm glad that now I can use lift instead of RoR.

don't you love systems which try to look like they are ready and rarin' to go, only to find out that it is a facade? like, WinXP starts up fast and gives you your Desktop but if you try to actually do anything right away it often doesn't pay attention to your clicks. Even worse, apparently, is Parallels - it had the screen image restored, but took a good 30 to 60 seconds to come to life, really, all with nothing to show you any sort of status so you would know when it was really unhibernated.

First Peter Norvig, then reddit.

pick your poison now that the free lunch is over: message passing, shared mutable state with locks, transactional memory magic? at the moment i think i like the skeletons thing because it seems most likely to actually be safe. still, one size does not fit all, i guess.

pick your poison in the OO world: brittle code, dependency injection, aspect oriented programming, or thread global variables? something else?

sure, Emacs is super customizable. but it is also an old product which means it has grown somewhat organically over time, leading i think to something less than perfect when it comes to configuration. for example, setting the cursor color so that it is what i want in all buffers old and new seems to be harder than i would expect. like, i can (set 'default-cursor-type 'box) but there isn't a set-default-cursor-color or 'default-cursor-color that i have found yet. hm.

yeah, i had to do that once, too.

windows package/application management sucks. mac os x package management sucks. linux package management sucks.

hooray for technology.

there are so many levels of suck involved. there's the user interface and usability of the package management tools. there's the explosion of interdependencies which often prevent you from being able to install or upgrade things. there's the N different competing ways to install and maintain packages on any given OS.

so, basically, monads in Haskell syntax suffer something like checked exceptions in Java syntax. it makes me wonder if uniqueness typing is a better approach?

it impresses me just how good a job does of making their Developer web site such a pain in the ass to get anything useful out of.

sure, the web is the future, and web applications like google documents are the future. which means the future is full of hayte for me since i apparently won't be able to use the old school keyboard shortcuts to save things. etc.

[update: they've fixed it so Ctrl-S works. Well, that's great... except for how i'm on a bloody mac, so it should be Cmd-S, duh!]

also, presumably there will be some limit to how often they will save back to the server if they are popular? unless they are on some big system like google's, i guess, which can handle the load. not that autosaving in desktop apps is all that impressive; probably if you compared autosave it is better on the web even with whatever restrictions it might have? weird. sad. whacky. stuff.

well, at least at a layman's talking-at-the-local-watering-hole level, I think I can claim to understand monads. of course, maybe I'm actually just on crack.

nice when things like YourKit get stuck trying to connect to something i told them to connect to, then realized it won't work, but it doesn't give me a cancel button.

i kinda hate the Quicktime player since it doesn't seem to have a Zoom feature. like, i just want to get the low bitrate stream, but see it at 1.5x or maybe 2x size.

sure, it all sucks, but isn't it still probably better than anything MSFT can put out?

and thus did RedHat, and all its offshoots in the end, die.

all i'm saying is, you'll catch more thinkos if you use Hashtable instead of HashMap.

is it me, or does Java really pretty much freaking super suck when it comes to handling dates and time? like, i just want to be able to do time subtraction and greater-than tests, but that's a freaking pain in the ass in Java.

good thing it is so easy to select-all the text of a message you are reading i gmail. oh. wait.

if you (well, at least if I) have a trailing comma at the end of a list of addresses in gmail, and then try to select-all of the text in the field, something presumably ajaxian immediately undoes your select-all and moves the text caret to just after the comma. so you cannot select-all.

you have to delete the trailing comma and then you can.

freaking sweet shoot to kill shoot to kill.

funny how the right-click menus in NetBeans 6.0 on the Mac are drawn with non-standard margin sizes, so they look like crap.

if i'm sending something to myself in Gmail, i want to be able to tag it while i'm writing it, rather than having to wait to receive it and then tag it. you know? blah.

i've heard enough about Fitts' Law to both appreciate it a lot, and yet hate the regurgitated dogma. for example, i find it mentally easier to have each application have its own local menus when i'm using multiple displays because the menus are closer to the application, and i don't have to switch apps to get the right menus to show up. so i think i actually would rather not have the classic Mac style menus in that case.

on the other hand, if i have something maximized to full screen on a single display, then sure, i want the Mac-style.

the NetBeans profiler sounds like it is quite possibly entirely too clever for its own good.

besides the fact that apparently you can't attach to an already-running application unless it is on a 1.6 VM. whereas jconsole lets you do that. (presumably because of all the fancy-pants bytecode injection fu that netbeans is all hot and bothered with which to get jiggy.)

the irony is that i tried to use the 5.5 version, and it apparently only works with a hacked version of JDK 1.4.2 which is really weird. so 1.5 is a little bermuda triangle of unsupportedness.

Quicksilver on the Mac is a nice idea. But when I install a new program and then try to launch it with Qs, it often doesn't know about the new thing. Whereas if I just use Spotlight, it shows it at the top of the list and I can launch it from there.

funny to see a discount web site which has the retail price crossed out and their price next to it, but in this particular case it reads "16.95 16.95". so much for copy editing, or intelligent software.

apparently Eclipse needs a checkbox which says "remember my decision to remember my decision" under the checkbox which says "remember my decision" since often it seems to not remember my decision. yippee.

sure, craigslist is great... except for how the search is pretty piss-poor when it comes to features like being able to require all words, or require some words not match.

at least with open source, when the documentation sucks you can in desperation dive into the code to see what the story is. not that it is always possible because what you might be wondering about can be arbitrarily complex in the codez, but at least you have the option to look at all.

i think the original ideas behind the whole Office 2007 "ribbon" thing are neat. but the execution? ja, well. i think the main problem with it is that now there are several completely differently looking ways to get at a command. so even just knowing where to hunt for commands has suddenly gotten hard because of the big UI change.

the last time i use the installed Parallels XP machine, it also shared its C: drive via the Mac Finder so i could put stuff onto the Windows machine easily. this time, it doesn't do that. no matter what i do. perhaps it was the update they made me download and install? yay. technology.

oh. rebooting the XP image made it then say that the Parallels Tools were out of date, and it updated those. and then i had to restart the vm again. and then the C: drive automatically did appear in the Finder once again. yay.

good thing NeoOffice does such a great job when it comes to user interface, usability, and not generally locking up.

using gmail reminds me how much better life is when you have a "reading" pane in addition to a "subjects" one.

i think the Mac OS X icon for the Applications folder is entirely too clever for its own good; it is barely OK when it is really large (like when seen in an installer) but i think it is ass-ugly, and visually unparsable unless you've seen the larger version, at the regular Finder window size.

it sure makes me smile when the BofA ATM is making loud annoying beeping noises because it wants me to not forget to take my money, receipt, or card, yet it hasn't actually spat those out yet. so it is yelling at me for not doing something it is preventing me from doing!

it is a lot of fun when something like, say, Eclipse has a "feature" like, say, "Go Into" in the Package Explorer, and then doesn't have an obvious opposite command to get me out of this hell I accidentally got into. (ok, turns out the command to get out is not available in the same right-click menu as the go into is in, but it is available from the menu bar.)

neat how Bank of America and Microsoft Virtual Earth have teamed up to give out wrong directions to BofA locations. the one i went to was actually on the opposite side of the bloody (divided) street.

ah, technology, you never fail to let us down.

thank goodness Mac OS X handles multiple monitors so much better than Windows XP. oh, wait, it doesn't. really. at all. aaaaaaarrrrrrrggggggggghhhhhhhhhh.

parking structures where you can't just directly drive to the top floors, but instead have to drive back and forth the length of the building to get to each ramp, are enough to get a beheading in my dictatorship.

you can "close" a project in Eclipse, but the classes in it will still pollute the Open Type dialog. so that's stupendously idiotic.

The whole thing with Mac OS X and Windows XP trying to have fancy effects in their windows and desktops and dialog boxes is, to me, really freaking annoying. I don't want to have to wait for each and every bloody dialog box on the Mac to animate itself into and out of existence. Just freaking draw it already and stop wasting my time!

A corollary is that if a user does some work and then finds out they have gone down the wrong path when they meant to go down a parallel path, there should be an easy and obvious way to switch over to the other path without losing all that work.

anybody who uses "stunning" or "bold" or that kind of speak in their marketing prose is, basically, a sphincter through which excrement passes. i mean, when was the last time you looked at something and were literally stunned?

another problem with the way Subclipse works is that it tries to magically integrate itself with things and doesn't give you enough information about what is actually happening. so if you go to e.g. delete something, it isn't at all obvious if you are also deleting the thing in SVN. sure, there are the little icon changes, but i think those are really lame and insufficient for something as potentially earth-shatteringly important as deleting things from your source control.

Eclipse and its sundry tools (like Subclipse) piss me off in that they are really inflexible: if you don't start things from within them, you generally can't get them to understand what is out in the world. Making a project based off of existing files, or connecting a directory tree to SVN if you didn't check out via Subclipse; all those things have led to pain and suffering in my experience.

the shell mode in Emacs sucks. not only does it suck when used with Cygwin. it also sucks when i'm on a unix machine (Mac OS X) and open a shell in Emacs and ssh to another machine and then try to use tab completion in the shell; Emacs doesn't know how to do that even though the remote shell sure does. so that's a nice step down in usability.

Eclipse really can just bite me. Every time I add a new Project and try to add an Ant builder to it, I just want to call that Builder "Ant" but you aren't allowed to repeat Builder names across all Projects in the Workspace, apparently!?

A little excerpt from a friend's rant: "Software should never force a user to do a task that software can and should do."

i've been getting a little bit more into SLR photography. my favourite hacks are:

• using a clear old 35mm film canister to put over the pop-up flash as a diffuser. just cut a hole along the length of it so it can slide over the flash, works great.



• i'm going to make myself a string monopod. i'm probably also going to try to make myself a cheap-ass stick monopod.



• also, i want to make myself my own version of a gorilla pod, just using the bigger pipe-cleaner type things you use to wrap up hoses and cables.

normally, the fact that things like Subclipse suck can be worked around by using the command line interface when desperate. however, Subclipse seems to have managed to make even that not work - when i use svn update it asks me for a password, but none of the relevant passwords work, so i really have no freaking idea what is going on. other than that i'm screwed.

it is still driving me crazy that in Eclipse on the Mac if i click on a separator within a menu, the menu goes away. this is, to me, injury added to the insult of there being too many things crammed into menus with small fonts in them. blah.

if there's one person i'd throw into the dungeon, it is whoever came up with the thing where web pages have double-underlined links which when hovered over pop up a little window which is supposed to be some kind of helpful thing, i guess, but really is only marketing crap that gets in the way and makes me see red.

the depths to which usability sinks: i'm trying to fill out parts of a web form in Firefox. i've typed into one field. i'm trying to click on another field so i can enter text there. but the first field now has some helper window thingy under it to show possible completions of what i've typed there. so when i click on the other field, the click doesn't actually move focus over to the field, it just dismisses the completion box. so then i'm typing but it is going into the wrong place... and the bloody completion window is back, too.

this sort of thing also happens when i'm trying to edit text in the google search field - somehow Firefox gets off by one click so that when i try to double click to select a word, instead on the first click the completion window shows up and on the second click it goes away and nothing gets selected.

the hate sorta coalesces into a solid, coal-like, material.

it pretty much gives me a hernia every time i try to use the likes of Facebook or LinkedIn - i find their usability to be horribly lacking, which seems really very strange to me since i don't think their core features are that complicated to understand. like, it seems like they would have to really go out of their way to have come up with the ui they have.

if you don't immediately understand why Moveto's "Narrow Your Results" UI is a flying piece of crap... then maybe you can go work there!

(not to mention their whole interactive map thing. well, at least it doesn't yet apparently randomly hide and reveal markers like i see both trulia and ziprealty doing.)

they keyboard on this MacBook Pro has back-lighting. today for some reason the lighting wouldn't come on. pressing the lighting adjustement buttons (f8-f10) showed the big display overlay icon thingy, but it had a little "do not enter" sign on it?!

after a while, the lighting came back on by itself.

I wish that monads used better names for things. In my mind, "return" and "bind" should at least be exchanged. Better yet, replace them with something like "wrap" and "manipulate". Something.

neat how the Subversion progress bar hits the end and the job isn't done for another 30 - 60 seconds...

all i can say is, i'd much rather spend my brain cells on Haskell mind-benders than on C++ hell.

i think the whole Collections vs. Array thing in Java is kind of a nightmare. like, varargs come in as an Array which can really suck for code calling in since i dare say more often people would be using Collections, so they have to incur the .toArray() impedance mismatch conversion. i guess. or something.

another thing that sucks about Eclipse is that it has all this crazy fancy-pants syntax coloring, and the UI for it all is a freaking nightmare. one small example is that i will see something being colored and not know why, and it is a huge pain in the ass to find out.

all i can say is, word.

not only does the Preview app on the Mac start out with the hateful annoying screen-space wasting "drawer" thing exposed, but the keyboard shortcut to get rid of it isn't a simple 2-key combo like Cmd-Letter, it is a 3-key combo. insult to injury.

why do famous artists have to have such ass munching web sites when it comes to basic usability?

one of the many problems with technology is that when you ask for one thing, They decide to ram a bunch of other stuff down with it as well. for example, all i want is something like Searchlight or slocate for this crappy Windows XP world. so i'm trying the Google Desktop Search. but of course, it comes with all sorts of other "features" i don't want and hate and apparently some of which i can't even turn off - it keeps telling me when new gmail items arrive with a tray/taskbar pop-up, and i hate that!

more reasons to dislike Java: "The stipulation above does not imply that sets must accept all elements; sets may refuse to add any particular element, including null, and throwing an exception, as described in the specification for Collection.add. Individual set implementations should clearly document any restrictions on the elements that they may contain."

guess they've never heard of the "nullable" idea. oy veh. also, guess they don't follow their own advice since the docs for HashSet.add() don't say if nulls are allowed. (Yes, it does say it at the top of the HashSet docs, but that's less than ideal.)

my admittedly unrefined and off-the-cuff current thinking is that you can't really get good object-oriented programming when you use a system lacking mixins/traits. single inheritance, even with interfaces, is just a huge albatross. when faced with it, i end up usually wanting to just do things in a more classic data-and-functions way because it is just too painful to have to work around the compiler with all sorts of so-called design patterns.

thank goodness the monopoly telephone company has that really effective automatic voice recognition technology that works every time and always understands what i'm saying.

i swear to <deity>, there is no online photo site that doesn't suck. it is as if the concept of AJAX never really got through their thick heads. well, and then for the places where it did, what got through to them was "fancy effects" not "actual usability when managing all the photos".

it is probably just me, but i pretty much can't ever figure out the right syntax with rsync when it comes to a couple of things: include/excludes, and when to have ending "/"'s on paths. so i inevitably spend more time trying to get it right, when if i'd just written my own perl or shel script, or bloody well done it by hand on the cli or in a gui it would have gone quicker. blah. it doesn't help that the "dry-run" mode really doesn't give you enough info to figure out the ending "/" issue.

the Transporter upload utility for Winkflash is, well, better than what i saw for Flickr, even if it doesn't support things like bit rate control.

hm. funny how the text caret was blinking in the text entry field on a web page in Firefox, and yet when i typed nothing happened. i had to click-to-focus on that window first. whatever.

oh, for <expletive>'s sake! cpan in cygwin on windows xp on fat doesn't handle whitespace in the path to my home directory. i just blows up saying "sh: /home/Firstname: No such directory" so that's just peachy great.

ui is hard. Eclipse sorts things in the completion list alphabetically i guess, which means that "max" always comes before "min" which is always backwards to me.

i'm really not completely incompetent when it comes to unix, and yet i've pretty much never managed to have getopt or getopts work for me. gosh, unix sucks. or at least the docs seem to.

maybe you can't use getops in a shell function?! but only at the "top level" of the shell, when it is sourced?! so i can't use it in my aliases?! ... ah, yeah, maybe that's it. so i have to break out any functions into their own shell scripts and then call them rather than having them inline in my e.g. .bashrc i guess.

i don't think the whole "auto build" thing in Eclipse works the way i want it to. hm. maybe if there were at least a standard keyboard shortcut for "clean & build all" or something it would help.

things like Eclipse have so much stuff in them that the UI quickly becomes a huge pain in the ass of lots of pointy-clicky, working your way through labyrinths to get your work done. i wonder if they could try to do something like Quicksilver within Eclipse itself?

i love how when i look at my last blogger post, it has text chopped off on the right (the debug string) rather than wrapping it or anything. and no scroll bar. talk about usability!

sufficeth to say, trying to get Eclipse and JUnit and Ant to play together so I can freaking debug my tests has proven to be a comedy of painful usability super suckfulness. so that's a lot of joy. (the handling of Ant in Eclipse is bad enough to begin with. it never remembers what build.xml files i was just using, so i have to add them every time i show the Ant window; it doesn't seem to let me double click on a target to run just that target, it runs the default one instead - oh, wait, that is apparently because it runs all the builders before running the target, but i don't actually always want that since i might be debugging the build script that one of the builders uses, ya know; etc.) i think the problem in the end was that you can't have one Ant property that is your full debug string of "-Xdebug -Xnoagent -Xrunjdwp:transport=dt_socket,address=8787,server=y,suspend=y" because those need to be sent to the JVM as individual arguments. blah.

of course it is great UI for Eclipse to have the Java Search dialog:

• start with defaults i pretty much never want


• not remember what settings i used last time


• not have any way for me to set the defaults

yessssss!

i swear, i have no freaking idea when Eclipse will take the closing parenthesis i type and insert it as new character, or eat it up since it already had one automatically put in when i typed the opening one.

i think it is pretty clear that good code developed with testing in mind is going to be architected and designed differently than code which never really paid even much lip service to the testing concept. which means if you didn't start with testing in mind, then trying to add tests, even for new code, sure is going to suck.

(heck, i wonder how much the idea of testing would cause even your choice of language to change; there might be languages where you can more easily swap things in and out for testing, what with duck typing or whatever. and if that is easier, then maybe there is more testing. having said all that, i'm still a big fan of the more static typing the better, especially if it comes along with type inference. better to catch bugs, including think-os, early on.)

it blows my mind that some of the basic niceities of Emacs, which probably are decades old at this point, still haven't been implemented by other editors. case in point: when i do a find/replace in Eclipse, there isn't a super simple way to tell it to keep the capitalization from the source that is being changed. so when i'm trying to change:

void addFooBar( FooBar foobar )

to something like:

void addZiggy( Ziggy ziggy )

it all just sucks.

At least on Windows, I think it used to be (maybe stil is) that in Eclipse the mouse wheel wouldn't focus-follows-cursor. But that appears to be working when I use Eclipse on this MacBook Pro, which is an improvement.

i'm sure plenty of other people have wasted their breath on this before, and i'm sure this kind of design will happen again in other languages... but it really freaking annoys me that the whole fancy-pants "improved for(-each)" in Java 1.5+ is hard-coded to only work with objects implementing iterator() which means you cannot easily have your object return different types of iterators and use for(-each).

genius. ship it.

basically, i wish i were using something less stupid and half-assed than Java. Scala, O'Caml, Python? Something!

personally, i think Java Interfaces should start with an "I". i think it is a bit like the fact that I also think good method names are, from one vantage point, often overly redundant given the types of the method arguments.

right! everyone is an idiot. i think if i can keep that in mind, i can get my expectations down to something more realistic? (hey, of course i'm including myself in "everyone"!)

i'll mention it again, because it happens so often: Eclipse puts up some tool tip thing while I'm looking at Java code, and then the tool tip gets stuck and nothing I do (short of restarting) will make it go away. so that's a really big help.

oh and the times when i actually want the tool tip to appear? yeah, often it just doesn't.

w00t! now i'm developing with gas.

[update: when it has the stuck tool-tip, i can even hide the application on this Mac and the tool-tip overlay window is still visible on the screen. so that's pretty neat stuff.]

it will probably drive me to an early grave, the way the Team Subversion SVN stuff in Eclipse is totally freaking broken. Il est à pleurer. Il est à souffrir.

ok, really, it should be no surprise, but gosh i freaking hate all outsourced financial things. pretty much any 401k i've had has been something of a customer service nightmare. so much for the glorious new "service economy" the USA is supposed to have. i mean, for XYZ's sake, it is all outsourced to india, anyway!

in case you were wondering, as far as i can tell all of the utilities for uploading things to Flickr are, well... kinda crap!

Let me expand on that a little: they are all definitely pretty much complete and utter excrement! This is why Y! bought them for x million dollars?! Why does anybody even bother to use them? Surely there is some photo site somewhere with upload tools that aren' this broken? (although i know 23hq is not that site, they suck a lot, too.)

i think i've always thought this was back-ass-wards. sorta like the whole intron/exon thing.

hm, nice how the Mac's "Force Quit" doesn't actually work, often. i have to resort to using kill -9 from the command line; hardly an intuitive ui the Mac is supposed to have wrapped around unix.

BTW, the thing which seems to lock up often is Eclipse. nice. it also kills me that Eclipse seems to never checkpoint what i am working on, so if it crashes and i restart it, the view i get is the view i had the last time i restarted it.

unmitigated, beautiful, genius.

another circle of hell must be invented for anybody who makes real estate search web sites. they are to a fault really really really freaking stupid obviously broken frustrating hateful. sure, it beats the old school newspaper action, but they are just so not what they should be.

like, i literally have not found a single site that shows a map of houses that isn't either obviously broken, like buggy, or just has a completely hateful user interface. not to mention the fact that nobody bothers to let you overlay Megan's Law data.

if Eclipse is supposed to be so handy... it needs to do a better job of helping me call out to new methods in not-yet-included classes. the current implementation just doesn't work for me at all; either it doesn't have any idea what I'm trying to do and is completely unhelpful, or it dynamically adds things to the import statement in ways i don't like. it seems to almost never actually be appropriately helpful so i spend as much time fighting it as i would have just managing imports manually?!

it keeps on driving me nuts: if i use fast user switching on this MacBook Pro to not log me out, but put up the password entry (effectively locking my account), when i log back in the brightness isn't what i had it set to when i was logged in and i have to adjust it again.

when you hit a breakpoint in Eclipse, it doesn't seem to in any way indicate which breakpoint it is in the list of breakpoints. well, or if it does, it isn't anything obvious that makes any sense to me. i mean, what would be so bloody hard about having an arrow icon, or showing it in italics, or something?

technology is hard. the display overlay that shows up on this MacBook Pro when i'm changing the brightness sometimes only shows the quantity changing when it has changed by 2 steps. which seems clearly to be a bug; if then i go all the way down to zero and then back up, it fixes itself to showing each step of change.

if i had one wish granted, right now i think it would be to have a special circle of heckdom for anybody who uses ring tones.

i.

hate.

trulia.

i love how much Eclipse sucks when it comes to doing something like finding all uses of a particular implementation of toString(). it ends up showing me like every toString for every type, not just the specific type i'm talking about. so that's really useful.

and, since Object implements a public toString(), i can't even use the compiler to tell me what is using the specific call. fun, fun, fun.

there are so many things that you need to do to stay on top of your code if you want it to not suck. at the moment one, the lack of which is killing me, is code reviews.

ok, i think that's it: i've had it up to here with people (including myself) writing code with all sorts of spaghetti crap just because things aren't immutable. give me hard core functional programming (haskell, erlang, etc.) or... give me some crappy Java job, whimper.

multiple monitors on computers still kinda sucks. for example, on a Mac, in Firefox, I click on a pop-up menu and rather than drawing down the display it is on, it draws up off into the other display. even though there is plenty of room on its display. so that's just bad usability.

the Team Synchronize view / perspective in Eclipse is whacked. seems like every time i run it, it has the folders from previous compares as well as current ones. by which i mean you end up with N copies of any given folder in the tree, where N is the number of times you've done something (maybe a commit?).

gosh, i'm so glad Eclipse makes it so easy to set breakpoints on lines of source code that don't have bytecode, so your breakpoint is really meaningless and you tear our your hair wondering why it isn't being hit.

is it just me, or is it really stupid that the File Search in Eclipse doesn't have a "Whole word" checkbox?

some random things i think could use some abstraction in most Java programs: One is the issue of using -1 vs. a boolean to represent that something is not supported e.g. "oh, -1 means they are something that doesn't have an IQ, like a rock" vs. "oh, check the boolean hasIQ" (vs. different Interfaces, i guess, but that never works). Two is the issue of putting together a bunch of strings, especially for logging, when you want to put single quotes in the output around things you print out, so you can easily see whitespace. It ends up being a very hard to read mess of single and double quotes, along with plus signs all over the place, so it gets hard to tell what is inside the final output string. (yes, ides can help there with color coding, but I think things like that don't get such an escape clause; they need to be done in a way that just works even in plain old ASCII.)

while the UI isn't utterly perfect, if you have a Mac and are doing XML you might like XML Nanny. yes, i'm actually saying i at-least-don't-hayte something here.

i don't understand Open Type in Eclipse. well, ok, I understand it is broken. e.g. when there are two possible completions, it insists on fairly often defaulting to things i've never looked at before in this project rather than things i have.

at least in a multiple monitor environment, the things which are supposed to indicate if a given window has focus yet are not obvious enough for me. i keep having to click an extra time on a window after having thought it had focus but it didn't. i sorta wish there were something else to indicate it; i'd have to experiment with different ideas. slightly colorizing the inactive windows?

the UI for controlling the Java debugger in Eclipse sorta sucks. like, the buttons for things like terminating the app, or continuing on from your breakpoint enable and disable themselves depending on what part of the hierarchy of threads and stacks you have selected. and, there is no button to take you to the currently paused line of code the debugger is on.

ah, Eclipse, you freaking crack monkey. sure, you are right, i would never want the basic text search functionality to be available when i'm looking at an HTML file.

when you have more than one display on a Mac, then the idea of having the menu bar on one display only, vs. having the menus inside the application window like on Windows, starts to fall on its face.

when you are dealing with a laptop which sometimes is connected to multiple monitors, i think that the UI on the Mac sucks vs. Windows at least in that on Win you can right-click on the desktop to quickly get to the control panel for it, but I don't think you can do that on the Mac so it is more laborious to switch back and forth.

trac sucks. it spends a long time rendering some fancy-pants version of a file when all i want is to download it, and i don't see anything at the top of the page for that, and eventually (after watching the page laboriously draw and draw and draw) see the link at the bottom (talk about genius placement) for seeing it as plain text (so i can download / save it). whatever.

swear words: "other people's code." this, of course, includes my own.

it bugs me that the little arrows for hierarchical menus (at least in the Mac OS X version of Eclipse) aren't grayed out when there is nothing deeper.

some awesome usability. i mean, why would you want to make it easy for people to get into the site?

maybe it is just me, but i think the UI in the Mac system preferences with the lock for being able to make changes is annoying and backwards to me because i think in other places in the Mac OS the lock starts off the other way 'round. if i'm making any sense.

i love how i click to dismount a dmg in the Finder, and then nothing happens so i click on it again, but then it does go away and readjusts things so then the second click ends up going to whatever gets shifted to there, which might be another dmg with the close icon in the same place, so it then goes away also.

i wish i was smart.

gnu emacs on win xp, trying to run cygwin bash in emacs as the shell... is just plain super duper suck.

freaking Eclipse piece of junk. i'm trying to look through the results of a Search, and that tab keeps getting swapped out for the Console tab as the background build generates output.

a nice little indictment of command line interfaces: things have 'progressed' to the point where multi-character arguments sometimes use "--" and sometimes use just "-h". blah, humbug.

WordPad has a ruler, which makes it look like it should be able to keep paragraph text within the bounds you set up on the ruler. But it doesn't. So, like, that makes a lot of sense.

gosh, i really dislike Java some days. the fact that it doesn't have C# style "out" parameters kinda really really really really really sucks.

GUIs suck; if you make a GUI then you suck. like, you'll end up putting two commands right next to each other in some menu which are radically different, so some day i'll click on the wrong one by mistake and heaven only knows what the repercussions will be (i mean, apart from me then really wanting to go postal).

i love how XP brings up the Found New Hardware Wizard, but there isn't any new hardware i've added, and the so-called Wizard doesn't even tell me what it thinks it has found.

hm. the Subclipse GUI for reverting files sucks. Tortoise SVN's isn't much better, but it is better. why is this apparently a hard thing people don't grok how to do right?

cool how Eclipse has as tab in the format profile prefs called "New Lines"... which doesn't contain all the prefs for new lines. you need to also at least look at the "Control Statements" tab.